The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission published a draft Telecommunication Network & Licensing Regime Reform Policy 2025, opened it for public consultation, and sent it to the Posts and Telecommunications Division for government approval.
The headline change is simplification. The contested part is somewhere else entirely.
What the draft does
Bangladesh currently issues more than 20 types of telecom licence. The draft collapses that into three tiers, limiting the licensing layers a service must pass through:
- National Infrastructure & Connectivity Service Provider
- International Connectivity Service Provider (ICSP)
- Access Network Service Provider
Several minor intermediary categories are eliminated outright, on the stated grounds that they added operational burden and compliance cost without adding service.
Why a layered regime existed at all
This is worth explaining, because the layers were not an accident.
A fragmented licence structure distributes a market among many domestic holders. Separate licences for international gateways, interconnection exchanges, transmission and access meant no single company could own the path from a user to the outside world, and each layer created a domestic business with a protected position.
The cost of that design is exactly what the draft identifies: every layer takes a margin and adds a compliance step, so a bit of data crossing four licensed intermediaries is more expensive than one crossing none. Consumers pay for the structure.
The benefit, which the draft addresses less directly, is that no one party controls the chain.
The provision people are arguing about
Under the draft, foreign entities may hold up to 80% ownership in ISP, TCSP, CMSP and facility-based ICSP licences.
The criticism is not about that figure. It is that the guidelines place no stated limit on foreign partners taking ownership stakes in other BTRC licensees. Analysts have warned this opens the way to cross-ownership across segments — a single group holding positions at several tiers at once — which is the specific outcome the layered regime had prevented.
Reporting at the time framed it bluntly: a draft that keeps the door open to monopoly. That is a contestable reading, and it is a reasonable one given that removing the layers removes the structural barrier without putting a competition rule in its place.
Who said what, and why they differ
The Association of Mobile Telecom Operators of Bangladesh welcomed it as a "bold and necessary step" against an outdated framework. Internet service providers scrutinised it considerably more carefully.
The split follows the incentives exactly. Mobile operators are large, capitalised, and have foreign parent companies — a three-tier regime with permissive ownership lets them own more of their own supply chain and stop paying intermediaries. The intermediaries being removed are mostly smaller domestic firms whose licence is the business.
Both positions are self-interested and both describe something real. Consolidation genuinely does reduce cost; it also genuinely does reduce the number of independent participants.
What to watch
Not the tier count, which is sensible and overdue. The questions that decide the outcome are narrower: whether the final policy adds cross-ownership limits to replace the ones the layers used to provide implicitly; whether wholesale access to the consolidated infrastructure is priced and mandated, so a smaller operator can still reach customers; and whether the efficiency gains reach retail prices or stop at the operators' margins.
A simpler regime with the same number of serious competitors is a clear improvement. A simpler regime with fewer is a different policy wearing the same name.
Sources: BTRC's draft policy and consultation notice; AMTOB; The Daily Star; Dhaka Tribune; TBS News; and Prothom Alo's original report.
